NOTE as of 1/11/13 Update! I wrote this too soon. I wanted to be merciful towards Andrew Tate, because despite his flaws and now his criminal accusations coming to light, I was trying to see if there was a redeemable person within Mr. Tate. After I wrote the below post, Mr. Tate was arrested in Romania for possible sex trafficking. If true, and I say that only because the courts have to work themselves out, then Tate should face punishment. My initial reason in trying to reconcile Mr. Tate’s beliefs was because I felt frustrated that the Left appears at times to think a space for men is childish, and I felt the Right Wing gaining steam by appropriating masculinity which of course…angered me as a man. But, I spoke too soon. The type of masculinity Mr. Tate promotes isn’t progress at all. [End Note Update 1.11.23]

I’m proud that I’m a regular guy. Especially as I write my thoughts out. I have no real skin in the game, and I’m doing this for free for now. I am just sharing my thoughts.

I.

I don’t hate Andrew Tate, but I just don’t agree with him on most things, but he does make good points, or rather I can appreciate his ability to question things to attempt to find any latent hypocrisies in arguments.

But, it is easy to blame the Left because they represent A) change & inclusion, B) represent a threat into how we view economics by challenging “winner take all” games. It easy to put the Left into a bubble even though it’s very diverse ideologically speaking which ironically why it often stalls, e.g., anarchists vs social democrats vs democratic socialists vs reformists or revolutionaries vs communists who may or may not adhere to frameworks like Marxism.

I will be writing about an episode of the YouTube podcast called PBD Podcast I watched, under the larger Valuetainment Media Group, hosted by Patrick Bet-David and Adam Sosnick, titled: Exclusive: Andrew Tate UNCENSORED Interview with Andrew Tate, published on September 13, 2022.

I don’t think Andrew is evil. Maybe a little too intense for me, but that’s fine. Let him live his life.

Some good points or insights he has is (1) Men value respect/honor and some of the most dangerous or damaged men who do irrational things are often those who feel the most disrespected – granted, men have responsibility for their actions even if their egos are hurt, i.e., no excuses for violence, but Andrew is not making an excuse but giving an insight; (2) Men are emotional creatures capable of intense and deeper levels of love; (3) Modern men in many ways are “drone” like figures, and many lack a sense of purpose or meaning, considering institutions like marriage aren’t socially required anymore, so more and more people are more lonely that ever. Having kids can be a motivator for many because they have something to live for outside of themselves. The future has literally been labeled as not being of “men”, i.e., The Future is Female, however, I understand this catch phrase isn’t literal but serves as an inspirational battle cry; (4) Men in certain ways are held to what I call the “standard of disposability”, i.e., men are often seen as worthy of being sacrificed when times are rough because nature is rough, and women carry life. However, this isn’t entirely true because in many ways women who don’t comply to traditional norms are often seen as disposable too; (5) our society is being dumbed down with social media, however, I would argue that his is a collective effort by foreign enemies and not simply the Chinese, but also the Russians, Sauds, Iranians, etc. It’s also just a natural extension of capitalism where you need consumers who produce goods under division-of-labor, i.e., people specialize in one part of the production process without understanding the whole [I don’t know how to make a cellphone from scratch for example. And, no one was going to teach me how to, especially for free], etc.

I would also agree with Andrew calling out some annoying elements of certain segments of feminism such as saying men aren’t needed, but when something bad happens, calling out men for not being there.

For example, there was the sad case of the murder of Sarah Everard, who was killed by an active-duty cop, who stalked, sexually assaulted, and then killed the young women. A horrible case for sure. However, while surfing around Instagram, even in the United States where the story broke into the news cycle, I noticed many feminist pages calling out men collectively for her murder because they didn’t save her.

What were men supposed to do when they didn’t know she was in danger? She didn’t even know she was in danger. Many good men have been encouraged to not talk to women for fear of being a catcaller, a creep, “not reading signals” well enough, being accused of another guy just trying to get laid, or to be secretly recorded and used as a pawn in someone’s Tik Tok video about “trash men”. The reactions seemed borderline fanatical to me, i.e., people who have adopted a specific framework of seeing the world, so much so, they never question it, and when they apply this blanket framework to everything it creates distortions in people’s heads (i.e., they see flaws or contradictions). But they don’t question it because the ideology isn’t simply about equality but power, and it seems this power is being achieved pragmatically, i.e., by any means necessary, even if unfair criticism or outright hypocrisy is utilized.

Some of the women (emphasis on some) are saying they don’t need men, but men are supposed to magically appear when they’re in trouble and protect them, and if we don’t then it proves how crappy we are as men?  

Which is it?  Some want this free or expected protection, while never saying anything good about modern men, let alone ever sympathizing with men. But what’s funny is, is that that most men if they knew Sarah was in trouble would have intervened but they weren’t around to help her. They would have helped her without even knowing if she was a “radical feminist” or not.

Certain feminists have based their entire empowerment by challenging men. But, I’m too old to care, yet, I can admit this mentality has in part created a reactionary modern male movement, full of very impressionable people, which can get dangerous, considering the realities of our late-stage capitalist existences. [Note:  Feminism is not bad. It is a broad spectrum of various ideologies where women are central, so hating on feminism objectively, is nonsense because you can’t lump all feminists together]

II.

However, many of his concerning statements about women aside (or, at least crude analogies he might use to prove his points), one main issue with his rhetoric is it would be better suited if he criticized both sides, yet, as a chess player, I suspect Andrew is encouraging the more right-wing adjacent sentiment because it’s simply more conducive to his lifestyle at the current moment.

However in his interview on Valuetainment’s PBD Podcast, he stated he was apolitical, and he said some very progressive things (such as how the world rallied around Ukraine but traditionally the West exploited Africa and the Middle East and no one cared), etc.

He’s smart enough to know that any system has inherent flaws, but he’s also smart enough to know his audience and the reactionary elements within the political-right.

However, I am a proponent to the belief that even though Leftist thought is not perfect by any means, it will always be better than the political right, because the political left at least believes in humanism and inclusion. Yet, I’m critical of certain frameworks and mentalities in the contemporary left such as what I perceive as a “progressive form of segregation”, rather than focusing on uniting the proletariat around economic issues. Granted, I understand that intersectionality where identity is central is vital in analyzing injustice.

III

But, his persona aside, I think Andrew is funny, more so because after hearing his life story I can relate to him because he and myself were…military brats who are Americans of varying black ancestry living overseas. In other words, I know he’s funny. He reminds me of a relative. Sure, I don’t agree with him, but I don’t hate him. He is not dangerous to the world or rather he doesn’t want to harm the world. His dad is from the South, my dad is from the South. His dad was Air Force, my dad was Army even though we lived on an Air Base for many years (I, myself served in the USAF). I know he was raised in England and as a Cold War Era and later 1990s military brat living in Germany, I knew of the British bases like Lakenheath, Mindenhall, Alconbury, etc. His current persona aside, he reminds me of a kid I would have grown up with, notably since the military is so diverse, full of interracial families, etc.

But…

IV.

Andrew Tate talks about The Matrix a lot and to some extent he has valid points, i.e., we live in an ever-growing and more interconnected world where a few people at the top of power structures and institutions can craft narratives, especially though mass media. Basic stuff really. From a Leftist perspective, it’s basic Noam “Manufacturing Consent” Chomsky 101.  Talking about The Matrix is a smart business and marketing move, even if he truly believes it, because we do live in a “paranoid”, “they are out to get us” world especially as people subjectivity interpret data, often with their own preconceived biases, fears, etc. But those fears are not unfounded entirely, yet, how we act on what we learn is important though (e.g., violence isn’t the answer, or, it does more harm than good, it accelerates to chaos, etc.).

Ludwig Wittgenstein said it best that the “limits of my language is the limits of my world”. This is true about everyone, me included.

And, Andrew using the film reference is simply because the movie The Matrix was popular, and a recent version was released (fresh on peoples’ minds), so saying The Matrix creates a subconscious pathway (I suppose, neural-linguistic programming) that people can understand since the movie is embedded into pop culture (people know it even without seeing it).

Yet, Andrew, like many in the digital “Manosphere” space, keep making this basic mistake of thinking in dialectical terms, yet, they claim to be free from the matrix. These men in these spaces as they “revolt against the modern world” (a Julius Evola reference), always blame the political-left and are incapable it seems of checking their own ideology, including their love for capitalism, i.e., the capitalist bro culture that now encompasses the crypto-coin bro culture (which Andrew spoke out against in his interview with PBD and Adam of Valuetainment).

I would argue that they’re stuck in the matrix. In theory, that’s even the point of the films or a theory of them I would argue. There was no real escape. The blue pill, red pill dichotomy was largely manufactured by the engineers of the matrix, so just people you think you’re free, you’re sort of stuck in a Nietzschean “eternal recurrence” nightmare, i.e., you keep coming back to where you started, such as in the Greek myth of Sisyphus.

Andrew acknowledges that “we’re under control” and I agree with him. Our data is being tracked with coding such as “Meta Pixel” by Facebook (now Meta). Cameras are everywhere and software firms with government contracts are specializing in facial recognition. Every app on your phone even if dormant is sending your data to 3^rd party “data brokers”. Most of our food is made a few producers (which has benefits and negatives). Every aspect of modern life has been commodified. Mental health apps or Teladoc firms for example, though serving a real need, emulate the business model of social media companies and sell your data too. Our diets and lifestyles. Our retirements are pegged to the success of a stock market where the rich own most of the stocks to begin with, etc. It’s a rigged, pre-planned, Walt Disney – inspired, meets Patrick Bateman from American Psycho nightmare. Cities like Atlanta are building “cop cities”, while elsewhere there’s no affordable housing or cities don’t have drinkable water.

Capitalism in the West, not socialism, is turning more and more Orwellian by the day, but oddly, people support capitalism, since its so good at shrouding actual fear and intentions. In other words, acting like the” Alpha capitalist” might be covering up a person’s racism, fear, sexism, what have you. Capitalism being more individualist in nature is of course preferred by many on the political-right because it affords a passive aggressive way of segregating and maintaining historical hierarchies away from government regulations that might attempt at creating more equity for all. However, it could be argued that capitalism since it is individual creates an egalitarian state where capable individuals regardless of identity.

But, don’t you think the powerful are smart enough to already be one-hundred steps ahead?

It is chilling to think that your whole worldview and ideology, be it on the right or the political left, was designed and intended to serve a role as warring binaries? I truly believe, especially from an American perspective, that our countries were designed by the capitalist oligarch class using theories such as system’s theory where groups are treated like “commodities” to be pitted up against each other, so they never look up at power.

The people in power don’t care about capitalism or communism because they are smart enough to know that these ideas are things, i.e., tools, i.e., pragmatic concepts created to achieve certain objectives but within specific ways. For example, Communism tends to centralize resources which can be exploited, whereas capitalism has the tendency of exploiting labor to forge materials into finished products able to be jacked up in price with insane margins to make profit for a few owners.

Many of these men in the Manosphere, blame people of color, women, the LGBTQ community, etc., yet never seem to point to the fact that the misery they are trying to “Alpha Male” themselves out of is the result of a capitalist system that atomized society with concepts like division-of-labor, the monetization of time, wage theft, the notion of “sex sells” in advertising, pollution, poverty, gentrification, etc.

For example, I support women working because no woman is happy if she feels she didn’t at least try to own her life and own her own agency (considering men will guilt trip them if they aren’t able to earn their own income, i.e., “you’re living in my house”, “I buy the food”, etc.).

Yet, capitalism made women work because A) they were able to be exploited more easily and underpaid, and B) inflation over time caused by a confluence of diverse events over time and space created the need for two income households. The very fact that capitalism needs consumers inspired the two-income household, because more workers earning wages means more goods they will likely buy, thus more rich people. Yet, since growth must be a constant in capitalist systems, otherwise “people freak out” (market panics), to sustain this hard growth, capitalist either automate with machines, merge job specialties with management principles such as Lean Management or zero-defect Six Sigma, offshore to cheaper and more destitute waters,  The truth is that many men got away with being able to marry women by simply providing them things they couldn’t get on their own in a more regressive and anti-woman environment, such as women being disbarred from owning property or obtaining insurance.

Many of the men in these “Manosphere” spaces often refer to the video-game boss-like figure of Dr. Jordan B. Peterson. Peterson sold this myth to impressionable and angry young men raised by meme culture, Taco Bell, and video games, that their blight is the fault of the “Postmodern Neo-Marxists”, a type of hybrid scapegoat terms that mashes Pat Buchanan with covert nods to the Nazis themselves (who called anything they didn’t like such as modern art or Bauhaus architecture degenerate).

Peterson flat out lied about postmodernism, knowing that most people have no clue what it is. Postmodernism, as I’ve said many times before, is simply “after modernism”, i.e., it is a broad framework that challenges the structuralism, objective truth-claims, etc. The intention wasn’t to be “relativist” but to analyze or deconstruction objective truths because objectives can’t be oppressive but also very biased, e.g., just because history is written by winners doesn’t mean their version of history is accurate. Postmodernism is a result of capitalism, because capitalism built modernity (the Industrial Revolution which opened the door for the psychological revolution over religion), yet, postmodernism is simply when this capitalist system reaches its apex on some level and starts to create simulation of itself, and it becomes hard to discern what is real or what is fake, be it an object (for example, is a GMO apple a real apple?) or reality itself. Because, truth becomes more relative, even in the face of empirical data, society starts naturally becoming nihilistic, apathetic, etc., because people by way of capitalism have been reduced to what Nietzsche would call the “Last Man”, i.e., the coach potato, near sexless conspiracy theorists, whose food is produce by one mega corporation, works in a cubical farm, and lives amongst extreme wealth disparity and urban decay, with the last statement being the result of capitalist systems being rigged by the “winners” (buying out competition, paying off politicians, writing laws that gives them universal right to copyright claims, etc.).

Postmodernism is both a condition of living in late-stage capitalism where it’s hard to discern what is real or fake, but also a study of the condition and the study of the condition occurs in traditional philosophy discourse (e.g., the work of Fredric Jameson), experimental literature, art, etc.

V.

As already stated, I don’t think Andrew Tate is the worst person on the planet and even though he is a figure that has worked with many figures in the “Men’s Rights” or “Manosphere” space, I think that Andrew out of most of these people is authentic, or more authentic than most. Andrew didn’t need the Men’s Rights movement, Manosphere or YouTube to become successful, unlike others in these spaces, so he is able to be more honest. He doesn’t need to chase the algorithm or escalate toxicity to get likes (for example, the Fresh and Fit podcast), because the truth is most men in the Manosphere are faking it to they make it and are using their followers to fund their lifestyles. Tate had a particular lifestyle before the popularity of the Manosphere. However,

3 hours:48 minute:15 second, Andrew states that nations that are not privileged, such as the Global South or Eastern Europe, etc., are more prone to traditionalism because they need to rely on survival more so than spoiled Westerners. So, if Andrew is complementing these societies for being tougher because they are poor, then what made them poor to begin with? Capitalist exploitation, colonialism, divide-and-conquer politics meant to destabilize nations such as in African or Middle Eastern nations where borders were arbitrarily drawn by foreign powers and smashed warring groups with ancient feuds together (for example, the Tutsis vs Hutus in Rwanda, Sunnis vs Shias, Pakistanis vs Indians, etc.). Andrew often talks about how the Left, progressives, feminist, people who take the “blue pill”, socialists, etc., are the problem and weakening society, yet, he praises the strength of societies that are exploited by a globalist capitalist system for the benefit of the West, China, United States, etc. From predatory loans, all out invasions, intelligence agency orchestrated overthrows, narco-terrorism, eco-terrorism, political terrorism, and a general objective of exploiting people with nothing else to live for.

In other words, capitalism not only makes stronger societies more apathetic and spoiled (self-destructive), but it also creates great inequities in the developing world. The same people who control the “matrix” as Andrew puts it are responsible for both, but these people aren’t Communists, they’re corporatists, capitalists, etc. There’s a reason why every aspiring socialist nation received military hostility from Western powers because they jeopardized the cheap resources needed by capitalist to insanely mark up their items built with the sweat (surplus labor value) of workers.

It’s also interesting to note that people like Andrew lean towards people like Donald Trump because of the way he carries himself, yet, Trump called developing nations, “shit holes”. So, is Andrew saying that people from “shithole” developing nations that are exploited by a global capitalist system, stronger? If he has administration from them, then why not stand up for them against the powers of capitalism, and not just this manufactured hysteria regarding “wokeness”?

It is also interesting how Right Winger thinkers who espouse these strong-men beliefs are often xenophobic to some degree, yet, if immigrants have traditionalist cultures, then why not accept immigrants?

The irony of the Left and Right relating to immigrants is that progressive movements often accept immigrants, e.g., the notion of Borders Don’t Exists or Borders are Illegal, yet, once these immigrants come to their nation, some over time become conservative, either because they’re still adapting to the free libertine nature of Western societies, and/or they comply with the assimilation and supremacy mindset of conservatives, i.e., the immigrants want to fit in so they emulate those who oppress them. Yet, conservatives often don’t want immigrants coming despite exploiting their cheap labor at home and abroad, largely because of a sense of racial, ethnic, and/or group preservation sentiments.

Conclusion

Let’s say Andrew knows all I am saying. Cool. But, do the world a favor and call out capitalism. It’s popular to call out socialism or communism, but what is affecting the US for example? America was already in decline even before it was OK for Americans to identify as socialists.